Rami Hashish, PhD, DPT

21 months in the making. Stacked every opportunity to get here.

Growing up in Silicon Valley, I believed tech was meant to democratize opportunity and accelerate human progress. The early ethos of the Valley wasn’t just about building profitable products, but about shifting the trajectory of lives and societies. There was idealism, for sure, but also a serious belief that technical breakthroughs should serve human success. But somewhere along the way, parts of the industry traded vision for vanity. As capital flooded into tech, incentives shifted. Virality began to outpace value. The goalposts moved from solving hard, important problems to maximizing engagement, retention, and monetization. Today some of the brightest minds are pulled towards optimizing ad clicks and frictionless dopamine loops. Why? (Insert disclaimer: The issue isn’t the people). Innovation isn’t dead. (Insert disclaimer again: Many technologists are building remarkable human-centered tools.) It’s worth asking again and again: What is worth building? And who is it truly for?

The moment we started referring to companies who’ve raised at a billion dollar valuation as “billion dollar companies” we helped to shift the focus of startup founders from their customers to their investors. I prefer to call companies with a billion dollars in revenue “billion dollar companies”. In the first case - all it takes is an investor making a bet with someone else’s money. In the second, a billion dollars+ of value had to be delivered to customers. These are worlds apart.